This issue of the Electronic Journal of Communication is embedded in the context of scholars’ increasing attention to how technology affects interpersonal relationships through the ways people use and perceive technology, and interact through it.

Over the past two decades, scholars have developed increasingly nuanced understanding of how technology impacts everyday life. Public concerns about technology’s impact on work and community have existed since the Industrial Revolution (Wellman, 1997). During the 1980s-early 2000s, dystopian and utopian literature presented a pessimistic or optimistic picture of technology’s impact on society. Dystopianism focuses on technology’s alienating capability (Kling, 1996; Winters, 1998). Utopian discourses historically focus on technology’s democratizing and communitarian aspects (McOmber, 1999). For instance, studies of Freenets in the 1980s discussed how they supported interest groups’ advocacy (Milio, 1996).

Research more recently blurs the dystopian-utopian dichotomy by examining how people’s everyday interactions with technology are complex and frequently contradictory. Although a sizeable literature examines technology’s celebratory aspects, such as how online communities facilitate social activism and performances of identity (Ali & Fahmy, 2013; Bennett, 2014; Graham, Jackson & Wright, 2016; Karamat & Farooq, 2016), some scholars point out how technology can bring about social and political inequality and physical violence (Andreassen & Dyb, 2010; Tawfik, Reeves & Stich, 2016; Vasilescu, Capiluppi & Serebrenik, 2014). Technology can even diminish human capacity for immersive thinking. For example, Carr (2008, 2010) asserts that the Internet’s qualities of efficiency and immediacy are changing how readers engage with texts and process information. Instead of becoming deeply immersed in long prose, readers scan Web pages for small nuggets of information. As a result, Carr (2008) argues, “Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.”

Even as critics such as Carr (2010) cautiously approach the Internet’s impact on human engagement, organisations embrace technology to deliver their services because of its convenience, affordability, and increased capabilities. To this end, Bunch (2016) examines the proliferation of online university degree programs. These programs make learning and degrees more accessible, but researchers scrutinize the programs’ role as a means of successful learning. For instance, Artino (2007) found that determined variables influence student satisfaction when they complete courses online. Top factors that influence student satisfaction when they learn online are importance of interaction, Internet self-efficacy, and self-regulated learning (Bandura, 1988).

Almost two decades later, Bunch (2016) argues that these three interaction types continue to be significantly correlated with student satisfaction. Learner-instructor interaction and learner-content interaction significantly contribute to student satisfaction, while learner-learner interaction is a poor predictor of student satisfaction. This finding suggests that effective online learning requires human interaction. As this issue’s essays similarly point out, technology cannot be divorced from human interaction. People’s perceptions, uses, and interactions through technology are inevitably connected to their interpersonal relationships.

Technology’s Complex Intersections with Interpersonal Relationships

The essays examine the intersections between technology and different aspects of interpersonal relationships. We broadly define technology to include social media and personal communications technologies such as cell phones, tablet computers, personal music players, and other devices.

Three essays analyse how different communication channels both reflect and shape interpersonal relationships. Lee, Bassick, and Mumpower found that specific communication channels such as email and phone calls are associated with different conflict styles in long-distance romantic relationships (LDR). LDR partners tend to choose channels for initiating conflicts based on their perceptions of media affordances such as cue multiplicity, synchronicity, and mobility.

Although people use technology to manage conflict, it would be erroneous to suggest that technology has a deterministic impact on relationships. Two other essays examine how people use technologies to manage geographical distance in relationships. Stewart and Grosik examine how military families use new media such as Facebook and Skype to maintain relationships and gather information. Because loved ones are physically separated, they selectively choose different media for communication based on how the channels gratify needs for relational maintenance and information-seeking through monitoring and surveillance.

Technology can help maintain familial relationships when a child leaves the home. Summer and Ramirez tested the partner idealization component of the hyperpersonal perspective on college students and parents. They found that the frequency of mediated communication was positively related to idealization and relational quality. Face-to-face communication frequency was inversely related to idealization (positive affect thinking), but not directly related to relational quality.

Several essays examine technology’s potentially transformative impacts on personal identity and relationships. Green-Hamann and Sherblom look at how Second Life gives people a space where they can construct gender identity. The ability to correctly express one’s gender identity is imperative to being who we are.For people who perform gender in online interaction, the ease of online gender identity expressions extends beyond social media into face-to-face interactions.

Although many scholars criticize technology’s presence in the classroom, Liu, Burroughs, Tian, Harvey, and Housel argue that smartphones can positively impact learning and classroom communities. For example, instructors can write mobile device policies collaboratively with students and even build smartphones into class discussions to improve student accountability and sense of classroom community.

As Liu et al. point out, whether educators like it or not, smartphones are an essential component of college students’ “mobile culture” (Caron & Caronia, 2007). These essays collectively extend this reasoning by arguing that technologies are now part of many people’s interpersonal relationships. The essays thus help us further understand the complex interconnections between technology and relationships.

References

Ali, S. R., & Fahmy, S. (2013). Gatekeeping and citizen journalism: The use of social media during the recent uprisings in Iran, Egypt, and Libya. Media, War and Conflict, 6(1), 55-69. doi: 10.1177/1750635212469906

Références

Ali, S. R., & Fahmy, S. (2013). Gatekeeping and citizen journalism: The use of social media during the recent uprisings in Iran, Egypt, and Libya. Media, War and Conflict, 6(1), 55-69. doi: 10.1177/1750635212469906

Using Facebook and Skype for Marital Communication During American Military Deployment:A Uses and Gratifications Perspective

Margaret C. Stewart
University of North Florida
Jacksonville, FL, USA

Laurie A. Grosik
Saint Francis University
Loretto, PA, USA

Abstract: Loved ones of military personnel rely on innovative technologies to mediate their communication and attain vital family information during wartime deployment. This exploratory study analyzes data from interviews with ten American military spouses about the impact of Facebook and Skype as tools for maintenance of their marriages during deployment. Uses and gratifications theory guides this discussion of two central themes – mobility as well as monitoring and surveillance - which emerge in this original pilot study. As such, uses and gratifications theory is recognized as a framework in constant evolution in contemporary communication research due to the dynamic nature of social media and technologically-mediated communication.

Multimodal Communication, Idealization, and Relational Quality in College Students' Parental Relationships:
A Model of Partner Idealization in Ongoing Relationships

Erin M. Sumner
Trinity University
San Antonio, TX, USA

Artemio Ramirez Jr.
University of South Florida
Tampa, FL, USA

Abstract: This study tested the partner idealization component of the hyperpersonal perspective, and extended this perspective to the study of an ongoing relationship – college students and their parents. We proposed a model to encompass the cognitive and behavioral idealization mechanisms that past research identified as provoking positive relational outcomes. Results indicated that mediated communication frequency was positively related to both idealization and relational quality, and that idealization partially mediated the statistical relationship between mediated communication frequency and relational quality. Face-to-face communication frequency was inversely related to one indicator of idealization (positive affect thinking), but was not directly related to relational quality. That said, indirect effects were detected, such that face-to-face communication frequency was negatively and indirectly related to relational quality as a function
of positive affect thinking. These results were interpreted using concepts from interpersonal, family, and computer-mediated communication, and research future directions were discussed.

Transgender Transitioning:
The Influence of Virtual on Physical Identities

Sara Green-Hamann
John C. Sherblom

University of Maine
Orono, ME, USA

Abstract: A person may experience tension when a gender identity differs from the one that society expects. For a transgender person, this gender identity tension can pose communication challenges for personal and social relationships. A virtual environment provides a space between the personal and public presentations of self in which an individual can negotiate these tensions and explore a gender identity transition. As participants become immersed within the time and space of this virtual environment, they can reshape their identities in ways that have an influence, or Proteus effect, on their physical self-expressions. Our study examines the supportive conversations of a male-to-female transgender group that meets in Second Life. By analyzing the topics, indicators of virtual identity, and references to the Proteus effect in these conversations, we seek to understand how participants purposefully construct virtual identities that facilitate their
physical, relational, and personal transgender identity transitions. Our analysis of these conversations concludes that the support group environment assists in the development of these virtual identities, and that participants recognize positive Proteus effects in their physical-life transgender transitions.

The Impact of Smartphone Educational Use on
Student Connectedness and Out-of-Class Involvement

Abstract: This study investigates the impact of smartphones on student connectedness and out-of-class involvement. Our analysis draws on the technological acceptance model and involvement theory to explain how students’ perceived ease of use and usefulness of smartphones might impact their educational use. We examined how educational smartphone use might determine students’ connectedness in class and out-of-class involvement. We surveyed 267 college students and developed a structural equation model to explain out-of-class involvement. The results show that educational smartphone use significantly predicts student connectedness and out-of-class involvement. Our research offers several theoretical contributions. First, this study extends involvement theory to also include technology use as an involvement activity, and empirically tests it on smartphones in educational contexts. Second, we developed a theoretical model to explain student out
-of-class involvement. Our study’s empirical findings will guide instructors in developing effective mobile device policies and class activities that use smartphones.

This file may not be publicly distributed or reproduced without written permission of
the Communication Institute for Online Scholarship,
P.O. Box 57, Rotterdam Jct., NY 12150 USA (phone: 518-887-2443).